Lupus – when your body attacks itself
DR FAITH BYISRAEL
As a health educator, I’ve had to learn about a wide range of diseases. After seeing a lupus awareness month post from a friend recently, I recognised that I didn’t know anything about lupus. Here is what I’ve learned about this disease since then.
Lupus Awareness Month
According to the Lupus Foundation of America, May has been designated as Lupus Awareness Month. This year the theme is Let’s Make Lupus Visible, with an aim of rallying “family, friends and community to raise funds and awareness of the invisible physical, emotional and financial impact of lupus.” On May 21, individuals were encouraged to wear purple to health make Lupus visible.
Medically Reviewed
Lupus experts say to ask for help if you are struggling to manage your condition emotionally or physically.
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The licensed clinical psychologist Monica Blied, PhD, was a 27-year-old graduate student and single mother when she discovered that the debilitating fatigue and body-wide pain she was experiencing had a name: systemic lupus erythematosus. “My lupus diagnosis was a shock. I lost the hope of a healthy me,” she says.
At the time she had a 4-year-old. She worried about losing her ability to walk, she says. “I thought that losing my ability to walk would be the ultimate irony; I had been a runway model for Los Angeles Fashion Week and Ebony Fashion Fair!”
One Terre Haute native is fighting lupus, and she s also helping others along the way.
Posted: May 13, 2021 6:49 PM
Posted By: Porsha Williams
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - One Terre Haute native is fighting lupus, and she s also helping others along the way.
The month of May is Lupus Awareness Month.
Five million people around the world suffer from the auto-immune disease lupus, 1.5 million in the United States, and 36,000 Hoosiers.
News 10 sat down with a Terre Haute native. We learned how she is turning her battle with lupus into being a voice for others.
Emilee Hunt, 24, was diagnosed with lupus at the age of 16 while she was still in high school.